My dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity. –N. Katherine Hayles, 1999

iRobot, a film that plays with race in an interesting way given that the lead actor, Will Smith is both black and a Cyborg, depicts the plight of robots coming to consciousness.  This is scary because, there are a lot of them, and they are treated in such a way that, should they become aware that their life can be better, they might be a bit mad.  Having to live in a world where a piece of himself is possibly “turning bad”, moving towards violence rather than peace, the cyborg lead has an identity crisis as he is dependent on his robot arm but forced to define his humanity by his ability to distance himself from his robot parts.

Of course in iRobot the robots aren’t really real.  They are computer generated, part of the “Language of New Media” as explained in the book by the same name by Lev Manovich.  While Manovich posits that we have become a world of montage, I would say more so than montage, digital media it seems, has moved us to the realm of collage.  We have become a copy, paste and combine culture, and we have been for some time.  What is different is how inundated we have become with this type of representation of humanness and how comfortable we are with it.  Our ability to imagine robots has exceeded our ability to create them, so instead we digitally construct them through illusion, combining bits and pieces of various kinds of media.  The robots we show on screen now have far surpassed the full size models of Robbie the Robot and are now computer generated composites, bits and pieces of human actors grafted on to a digital frames.  This method was used in A.I., Artificial Intelligence (discussed on the Dark Territory page), and what we see are not actually robots, but a strange new passing, humans passing as robots when in actuality what we see on the screen cyborgic illusions

“If, as Jennifer González claims, the anxieties and fantasies of a culture are projected onto the image of the cyborg, then the cyborg must be read as a powerful metaphor for the historical bogeyman of contamination—racial mixing […] reading cyborgs as displaced representations of mixed-race people illuminates the ways in which we currently conceive of mixed-race subjectivity and interpolate mixed-race bodies” (Nishime 34).

I was elated to come across the article “The Mulatto Cyborg: Imagining a Multiracial Future” LeiLani Nishime.  Everything I had wanted to say about the representations of cyborgs as being a stand in for “mulatto” was there, even down to creating and defining the prototypes of the Good, the Bad, and the mulatto cyborg (35-46).   The existence of Nishime’s article coupled with Manovich’s work on new media language forced me to rethink where and how the cyborg should be imagined across media of representation.

While there are many articles looking at film and literary representations of cyborgs, there are different forms or representation that new media makes easy to create. This warrants an expansion of where we look for cyborg representations and discussions on the subject.  We are now able to use computer computers  to “perfect” the human form on the screen and create print media with photographs of the face of the future.  Though these representations do not have consciousness, their ability to affect our day to day lives and we discuss them as though they were real leads me to believe they somehow have access to agency.

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